Tuesday September 21, 01:20 PM
Searching for spam - one message at a time?
By Ingrid Marson, ZDNet UK
An anti-spam vendor is providing a low-tech solution to messaging
security - by employing people to sift emails to look for spam
As the amount of spam continues to increase, companies are looking for
solutions to increase the efficiency of filtering out spam and cut
down the amount of time employees spend sifting for spam.
Current estimates indicate that spam account from anything from 38
percent to 65 percent of emails, according to figures from market
researcher IDC and email security firm MessageLabs respectively.
eProvisia LLC claims that manual sifting is the solution to the global
problem of spam. It claims that its product, Spam Eradicator, is
foolproof against spammers.
"For the first time ever: 100 percent reliability in combating spam.
Guaranteed," states the company Web site, although it gives no further
details on the legal terms of this guarantee.
The company claims to have a team of over 100 "trained screening and
preselection specialists", who manually review all correspondence,
approving important emails and discarding junk mail.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos,
said on Monday that the main problem with this approach, which has
been proposed by other companies, is that legitimate email can
mistakenly be blocked. He also pointed out that there are issues of
confidentiality.
Mikael Albrecht, a product manager at security firm F-secure, was also
sceptical about the service, in particular its ability to scale.
"Volume will be a problem - how will it manage to handle a huge load
with just 100 people?" he said.
These are not the only uncertainties surrounding the company.
According to Web site eProvisia is based in Palymyra Atoll, a Pacific
coral atoll 1,000 miles south of Hawaii. But according to the US
department of the Interior Web site the atoll is uninhabited.
eProvisia also claims to have customers in 40 countries and large
money reserves, but points out in a footnote that not all the
countries are recognised by the UN and its reserves are in Palymyra
Atoll dollars, an internationally unrecognised currency.
eProvisia was not immediately available for comment.